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FalconStor is a well knowed company in the data protection field. They have interesting appliances to handle the backup to disk (D2D using NAS frontend) or backup to (virtual) tape (using the VTL frontend).

The choice between the two solutions is mainly on the front-end protocol and the existing backup environment: in some case could be better expose a tape like interface (for example in large environment with Legato NetWorker or Symantec NetBackup), in other cases the backup solutions works better with a network share and this become the first choice.

Now they have just announced the General Availability of version 8.0 of the FalconStor Optimized Backup & Deduplication solution. This solution combines industry-leading VTL technology and NAS functionality into one unified, simple-to-use platform with same core functions (that include also an enhanced support to Symantec OST).

It’s available in several installation scenarios:

Software

Integrated appliance (basically re-branded Dell PowerEdge servers)

Gateway more in order to using existing storage

And licenses could be tranfer from a system to a more recent system increasing the freedom of evolving your infrastructure.

Most of the improvements are on the speed and scalable aspects. FalconStor declares:

Customers that were using previous VTL solution will see an average of 10 more backup jobs running vs. the same jobs that ran on 7.5

For customers looking to do disk-based NAS backups, they can expect to see at least 12 more jobs run vs same jobs that ran on 7.0

That equates to 65% faster performance and 65% less time administrators need to oversee the backup process

Deduplication is completely flexible and policy-based: you can choose inline, post-process, concurrent, or no deduplication at all.

And the same apply for replication where it was optimized for even the slowest WAN and a new model has been added: you can replicate from A to B to C in order to keep different copy of your data in different sites.